Mongoloid - History of The Concept

History of The Concept

The earliest systematic use of the term was by Blumenbach in De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Variety of Mankind, University of Göttingen, first published in 1775, re-issued with alteration of the title-page in 1776). Blumenbach included East and South East Asians, but not Native Americans or Malays, who were each assigned separate categories.

In 1865, biologist Thomas Huxley presented the views of polygenesists (Huxley was not one of them) as "some imagine their assumed species of mankind were created where we find them... the Mongolians from the Orangs."

In 1972, physical anthropologist Carleton Coon said, "From a hyborean group there evolved, in northern Asia, the ancestral strain of the entire specialized Mongoloid family." In 1962, Coon believed that the Mongoloid "subspecies" existed "during most of the Pleistocene, from 500,000 to 10,000 years ago". According to Coon, the Mongoloid race had not completed its "invasions and expansions" into Southeast Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands until "oward the end of the Pleistocene". By this time Coon hypothesis that the Mongoloid race had become "sapien".

Paleo-anthropologist Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari characterize "his contention that the Mongoloid race crossed the 'sapiens threshold' first and thereby evolved the furthest".

Mohinder Kumar Bhasin (Hindi: महेंद्र कुमार भसीन) of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delhi suggested in a review of an article referencing Mourant 1983 that "The Caucasoids and the Mongoloid almost certainly became differentiated from one another somewhere in Asia" and that "Another differentiation, which probably took place in Asia, is that of the Australoids, perhaps from a common type before the separation of the Mongoloids."

Douglas J. Futuyma, professor of evolutionary processes at the University of Michigan, said the Mongoloid race "diverged 41,000 years ago" from a Mongoloid and Caucasoid group which diverged from Negroids "110,000 years ago".

In 1996, professor of anthropology, Akazawa Takeru (Japanese:赤沢威) of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, said Mongoloids originated in Xinjiang during the "Ice Age".

In 1999, Peter Brown of the Department of Anthropology and Paleoanthropology at the University of New England evaluated three sites with early East Asian modern human skeletal remains (Liujiang, Liuzhou, Guangxi, China; Shandingdong Man of (but not Peking Man) Zhoukoudian's Upper Cave; and Minatogawa in Okinawa) dated to between 10,175 to 33,200 years ago, and finds lack of support for the conventional designation of skeletons from this period as "Proto-Mongoloid"; this would make Neolithic sites 5500 to 7000 years ago (e.g. Banpo) the oldest known Mongoloid remains in East Asia, younger than some in the Americas. He concludes that the origin of the Mongoloid phenotype remains unknown, and could even lie in the New World.

The human fossil remains of the Ordos Man from Salawusu site in Inner Mongolia dated between 50,000 and 35,000 BCE show strong Mongoloid features, specifically on the fore-tooth and occipital bone.

In 2006, Yali Xue (Chinese: 薛亞黎) et al. of the genome research Sanger Institute conducted a study of linkage disequilibrium that found that northern populations in East Asia started to expand in number between 34 and 22 thousand years ago, before the last glacial maximum at 21–18 KYA, while southern populations started to expand between 18 and 12 KYA, but then grew faster, and suggests that the northern populations expanded earlier because they could exploit the abundant megafauna of the "Mammoth Steppe", while the southern populations could increase in number only when a warmer and more stable climate led to more plentiful plant resources such as tubers.

In 2008, Juan Frijolé Reixach professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Barcelona showcased the racial classification systems of Carleton S. Coon and H.V. Vallois in his 2008 book series about human races. Reixach said Vallois said the "Yellow Race" included the following groups: Siberian, North Mongoloid, Central Mongoloid, South Mongoloid, Indonesian, Polynesian, Eskimo and Amerindian.